Isaac’s high winds and rains, they speculate, could also stir up remnant crude oil from the BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill — exposing more residents and wildlife to its potentially toxic effects.

“This is another disaster on top of the hurricane that we’re going to have to deal with,” Garret Graves, chairman of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, told The Huffington Post. “The threat is not insignificant.”

Up to 1 million barrels of oil are estimated to remain in the Gulf of Mexico. That oil remains, Graves said, because BP has failed to clean it all up in the more than two years since the tragedy. “That’s four to five times the oil that was spilled with the Exxon Valdez,” he added.

Since the explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, scientists have been working to understand the impact that this disaster has had on the environment. For months, crude oil gushed into the water at a rate of approximately 53,000 barrels per day before the well was capped on July 15, 2010.

A new study confirms that oil from the Macondo well made it into the ocean’s food chain through the tiniest of organisms, zooplankton.Tiny drifting animals in the ocean, zooplankton are useful to track oil-derived pollution. They serve as food for baby fish and shrimp and act as conduits for the movement of oil contamination and pollutants into the food chain. The study confirms that not only did oil affect the ecosystem in the Gulf during the blowout, but it was still entering the food web after the well was capped.

BP Plc accused a unit of Halliburton Co. of intentionally destroying evidence that could be used to prove the oilfield services firm shares blame for the blowout that caused the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Halliburton Energy Services Inc. destroyed test results that showed samples of the cement used to seal London-based BP’s Macondo well, which exploded off the Louisiana coast last year, were unstable, BP said in a filing in federal court in New Orleans.

The oilfield services provider also suppressed computer models that might prove Halliburton was at fault “because it wanted to eliminate any risk that this evidence would be used against it at trial,” BP said in the filing. BP asked the court to find that Halliburton destroyed evidence on purpose and to compel the company to turn over for third-party examination the computer used for the modeling.

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded off the Gulf of Mexico last year, has given its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety performance in our company's history'', despite the blast that killed 11 people and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean...

“We’re all lab rats and we didn’t even know it.” Almost a year after the BP oil spill, Al Jazeera reports on the awful array of health problems being faced by Gulf Coast residents exposed to deadly chemicals (largely because of the cleanup effort). Perhaps most frighteningly, a generation of small children will be developing with ultra-high levels of toxic chemicals in their blood and their bodies, the effects of which remain to be seen:

BP’s oil disaster last summer gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest accidental marine oil spill in history – and the largest environmental disaster in US history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons toxic dispersants, including one chemical that has been banned in the UK.

Al Jazeera has talked with scores of sick people across the Gulf Coast who attribute their illnesses to chemicals from BP’s oil disaster.

Michael Edward writes about the ongoing ecological disaster that has befallen the population of the Gulf of Mexico, at blueplague.org:

There’s a new proprietary recipe being force-fed to all of us here on the Gulf of Mexico that is now becoming available worldwide. Although this recipe has been closely guarded for 8 months, we were able to break it down after examining the plentiful supply us “Gulf Coasters” have available here. The ingredients are abundantly available while both the recipe and the brewing process are not as secret as everyone had thought.

THE GULF BLUE PLATE (BP) SPECIAL

Fill a large bowl with saline ocean water, add a generous proportion of thick crude oil, then pour in a cup of liquid Correct-it (available from Nalco under the brand name Corexit) making sure you don’t spill any on yourself, stir gently, and then let it sit for a day or two.

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol,” Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, said. “People are being made sick in the Gulf because of the unprecedented release of oil and toxic chemicals from this past summer in response to BP’s disaster.”

Ott is frank in her assessment of the ongoing health crisis residents are facing in the Gulf.

“It’s clear to me there are four to five million people, from Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, through the big bend of Florida, who are being exposed to dangerous levels of dangerous chemicals,” she said.

“Oil and dispersants are in the air and water, that are at levels that exceeded the acute or intermediate threshold that federal agencies have declared to be safe. Just speaking of air exposure, and there are scientific papers on this, if you release one molecule of toluene, at three metres above the ground, into a six kilometre wind, that molecule, uninterrupted, will travel 34 kilometres.”

Charter plane pilots who have conducted Gulf over-flights have reported having to wipe an oily, orange film from their plane afterwards.

For the first time, federal scientists have found damage to deep sea coral and other marine life on the ocean floor several miles from the blown-out BP well — a strong indication that damage from the spill could be significantly greater than officials had previously acknowledged.

Tests are needed to verify that the coral died from oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, but the chief scientist who led the government-funded expedition said Friday he was convinced it was related.

“What we have at this point is the smoking gun,” said Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who led the expedition aboard the Ronald Brown, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel. “There is an abundance of circumstantial data that suggests that what happened is related to the recent oil spill,” Fisher said.

For the government, the findings were a departure from earlier statements.

Here's some clips from last night's episode of South Park (Watch entire show here).
Unsatisfied with just destroying the ecology of the Gulf Coast with a mere oil spill, BP ventures into another realm and eventually releases one of the Great Old Ones. 3,000 years of Darkness can't be that bad, right?